And there’s not enough Bautista to make up for it. It’s an insultingly obvious attempt to hit the lowest possible amount of Stallone footage and voiceovers needed to reasonably still have him in the middle on the cover. Sadly, part 2 is a dull low budget international production that starts off with generic young employees of Stallone’s character and then center around a bland new Chinese operative (Huang Xiaoming, IP MAN 2, THE GUILLOTINES). Miller’s SILENT NIGHT, and they’d added the great Dave Bautista to make up for the lack of Arnold, so it seemed promising to me. 2 – an odd time to do his first DTV sequel. By that time five years had passed, Stallone had earned an Oscar nomination for CREED and had a small role in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. I hope ESCAPE PLAN isn’t the last gasp for straight ahead R-rated theatrically released movies from the ’80s action icons.” It turned out to be a hit overseas, but ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES was still a surprise. it was a flop and got bad enough reviews that I started my review saying, “Well, shit. Plus it had a weirdly overqualified cast of Jim Caviezel, Sam Neill, Vincent D’Onofrio and Amy Ryan (plus Vinnie Jones and 50 Cent). ESCAPE PLAN is only my third favorite of those, but it’s a solid sort-of throwback action movie, it was fun to see Sly and Arnold together in something less winky than an Expendables, and it was especially cool to see Schwarzenegger kind of being a character actor, being funny and a little crazy as a sidekick instead of the hero. This was in 2013, after EXPENDABLES 1 and 2, in a period when Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were making solid old-man-action vehicles that just weren’t catching on ( BULLET TO THE HEAD, SABOTAGE, THE LAST STAND). It all began with a legit theatrical release from the director of 1408. I’m not sure why we’d ever be ranking the least likely trilogies of our cinematic era, but if the topic comes up, I’ll be sure to mention the ESCAPE PLAN saga.
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